TU Delft CTF 2026
TU Delft's annual beginner-friendly hacking competition
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About
The TU Delft CTF Team is organizing a beginner-friendly Capture The Flag competition open to everyone. In groups of 4, you will complete a series of challenges you can solve by hacking, reverse engineering, and exploiting vulnerabilities. If you are new to cybersecurity, this is the perfect opportunity to learn and have fun.
Two year ago, with 200 participants, TU Delft CTF 2024 became the biggest beginner-friendly cybersecurity competition in the Netherlands. Last year, we expanded the competition to 350 players, and on November 28th 2026, we are returning with 400 players!
Challenges of varying difficulty will be available, so there is something for everyone. There will be multiple categories, including:
- Web Security
- Reverse Engineering
- Forensics
- Cryptography
- Binary Exploitation
- OSINT
- Miscellaneous
The CTF will be in Jeopardy style, meaning that you can solve the challenges in any order. The team with the most points at the end of the competition wins. Each challenge will have a flag that you need to find and submit to the scoreboard to earn points.
At the start, all challenges are worth the same amount of points. As more teams solve a challenge, the points decrease for all teams, including teams that have already solved it. This means that harder challenges, which fewer teams solve, will be worth more points than easier challenges.
LLM Policy
This year, it is not allowed to use any kind of LLMs during the competition, except for those provided by the organizers. This includes not only agentic tools like Codex and Claude Code, but also their web variants.
Violation of this policy will result in disqualification from the competition.
When and where?
The competition will take place on Saturday, 28th of November, 2026, on the TU Delft campus, in Echo (Building 29). The address is Van Mourik Broekmanweg 5, 2628 XE Delft.
It is not possible to participate remotely, so make sure to be there on time!
Registration
Registration is open to everyone, regardless of experience. The competition is played in teams of 4.
You can register as a member of a team or as an individual. If you register as an individual, we'll match you with others. Alternatively, you can find potential teammates and form a team on our Discord server.
Registration is free. You can register on our registration portal.
Registration closes when 400 players have registered. Make sure to register on time, as last year all spots were filled within approximately a week.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at ctf-ewi@tudelft.nl.
Schedule
To be announced.
Rules
To ensure a fair competition, we have a few rules that all participants must follow. If you break any of these rules, you may be disqualified from the competition.
- Do not make use of LLMs, except for those provided by the organizers.
- Do not attack other teams, the infrastructure, or the competition platform.
- Do not share flags, solutions, or hints with other teams during the competition.
- Do not brute force flags on remote services, unless the challenge description explicitly allows it. If you can brute force a flag locally in a reasonable amount of time, that is allowed.
- 400 participants
- 60+ challenges
- 8 hours of hacking
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About the TU Delft CTF Team
The TU Delft CTF Team is the Capture the Flag student team of TU Delft, hosted by the EEMCS Cybersecurity group. We are a group of students passionate about cybersecurity, reverse engineering, and hacking.
We meet every tuesday evening to work on challenges, present solutions to each other, and learn more about cybersecurity. We also participate in Capture the Flag competitions, where we solve challenges to earn points and compete against other teams. Every year, we also organise the TU Delft CTF, our own beginner-friendly hacking competition.
If you are interested in joining us, feel free to join our Discord server. We welcome everyone, regardless of experience. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced hacker, you are welcome to join us and learn more about cybersecurity. We don't have any "membership" or "application" process, so you can just join us on Discord and start participating in our meetings and activities.
Contact us
If you have any questions about TU Delft CTF, would like to discuss sponsorship opportunities, or join our team, feel free to reach out to us at ctf-ewi@tudelft.nl.